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Toronto single mother Veronica Snooks is trying to work her way off social assistance and is grateful she can keep the first $200 she earns before triggering a deduction in her monthly cheque.

But she has learned through bitter experience that it doesn’t make sense to try to earn more than $200.

That is because social assistance benefits are calculated on the previous month’s earnings. And for people like Snooks, whose work opportunities are sporadic, a deduction in a month when she isn’t earning any money is a financial hardship.

“If I work this month, they take money off next month. But if I don’t make money next month, then I have less money to live on. It’s a real hassle,” she says.

Snooks, 52, suffers from mental health problems and struggles to support herself and her 20-year-old son on about $1,600 a month from the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Her son has just finished high school and is applying for college and part-time work to help out. But for now, the family relies solely on Snooks.

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Social policy experts say allowing people on welfare and disability benefits to reconcile their earnings annually, rather than monthly, would encourage them to take on more work and free up welfare workers to provide more employment support.

Veronica Snooks, who qualifies for disability social assistance, would like to work more but the monthly earnings limits make it difficult to take sporadic work.
(Tara Walton / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

“Because they don’t know how much they are going to receive, it is a real disincentive for them to work,” says welfare expert John Stapleton, a former provincial social services official.

“It’s not like the rest of us, who can simply dip into some savings or a line of credit or something like that,” he says. “These are people who are not going to be able to pay the rent or have enough for groceries in the months when they come up short.”

Problems with the province’s new $240 million Social Assistance Management System (SAMS) software platform resulted in $20 million in overpayments to 17,000 individuals or families across the province in November and December.

Rules and policies dealing with earnings exemptions in Ontario are “unrelated to the performance of our new computer system,” a government spokesperson told the Star.

British Columbia has just introduced annualized earnings exemptions for about 108,000 residents who rely on disability assistance in that province. Starting in January, a single disabled person can earn up to $9,600 a year before deductions. The previous monthly maximum was $800.

Under the B.C. changes, monthly income reporting continues, but deductions don’t kick in until a person’s annual earnings exemption is reached, officials say.

The policy change was based on a 2013 pilot project involving 1,500 disabled people who were switched to annualized earnings exemptions. It found 900 accepted work they otherwise would have turned down, resulting in higher incomes.

“This program will help families and people budget, plan, save and earn more money throughout the year,” Don McRae, B.C.’s minister of social development and social innovation, said in December, when the move was announced.

Ontario is monitoring B.C’s changes, says a spokesperson for the province’s Ministry of Community and Social Services.

“The complexity and the wide-ranging views about how the social assistance system should be transformed make reform particularly challenging,” says Kristen Tedesco.

“Ultimately, (the new computer system) will deliver social assistance programs more efficiently and give us the ability to implement changes to the system such as annualized earning exemption,” she adds.

“It is one of the areas that makes the system so complex,” she says. “It’s also a huge, huge workload issue — unwarranted, in my mind.”

MacVicar agrees with Stapleton, who believes people on social assistance should be treated like everyone else.

“Can you imagine if Revenue Canada implemented monthly reconciliation and you had to do your taxes each and every month? I guarantee federal computers would crash. It would be chaos,” Stapleton says.

Other monthly income support programs such as the federal Guaranteed Income Supplement for low-income seniors, the child benefit for families and Ontario’s Trillium benefit are based on the previous year’s income and don’t change from month to month, he adds.

“Why do we insist on monthly reconciliation for social assistance?” he says. “It only makes an already complex system needlessly more complicated.”

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